ID and Other Reflections

Thursday, September 1, 2016

Ambiguity leads to emergence! This fleeting thought crossed my mind in the middle of a busy day with enough clarity and suddenness to make me pause mid-stream. I made a note of it, telling myself that I will mull over it later. And here is the unfolding of that thought stream... The dictum that we are living in a VUCA world has become so oft used as to lose all its essence and meaning. Nevertheless, it is the truth! The pace of change has exceeded anything that we may have imagined creating a strange kind of almost existential tension. As robots enter our lives, Alexa, the voice controlled speaker from Amazon goes mainstream, driver-less cars cease to be a science fiction marvel, and many more digital wonders invade our day-to-day existence to forge a completely different meaning of life and living for many of us, Uncertainty and Ambiguity loom large. Our professional and personal lives are suddenly taking on whole new shapes we had not remotely envisaged. Should we cower in fear and scuttle into our shells, or venture forth courageously wearing the hat of a curious explorer? Well, the corporate world is trying hard to gear up for this unknown monster called VUCA. But how does one "plan for ambiguity"? Here's what HBR has to say about Ambiguity in their article Leading Effectively in a VUCA Environment:

There are a few things we know about ambiguity; it is one of the leading causes of conflict within a business unit, impossible to diagnose from a singular perspective, and its second- and third-order effects are capable of dismantling an organization.

The description is apt enough. And perhaps also encapsulates the key reasons why we fail to thrive in an ambiguous environment. It's mostly the third-order effects that dismantle organizations. And it happens because organizations forget to listen, collaborate and remain true to their purpose. More on this later in the post. Diverging a bit...IMHO, one cannot plan but stay prepared to flow with ambiguity, play with ambiguity, immerse themselves in it. As I pondered this rather obvious point, another question raised its hydra-like head. Life in general is fairly ambiguous. Yet, we flow with it. Children thrive in ambiguity. They are the quintessential explorers of the unknown, Columbuses of their own little worlds. They instinctively know the mantra to thrive in ambiguity; it's called PLAY. And from play comes learning; and from learning emerges their new realities. We go to design schools to learn about design sprints and the art of prototyping. Children build and break sand castles at will, destroying their own creations to come back and build again. Unfazed, unafraid! They are the quintessential prototype masters. It seems so effortless when we are children.

Then we grow up. We pass through the hallowed portals of many institutions that groom us, drill us, train us, teach us, test us, score us, and if they are successful, we come out as well-trained, homogeneous set of professionals. The unruliness has hopefully been ironed out. Hopefully, the curiosity has been dampened and the disruptive thoughts suppressed. We are deemed ready for the corporate world. And our collective ability to deal with or thrive in ambiguity has diminished! The corporate world thus far has thrived on processes, planning, and power. Ambiguities have always been ironed out, and quarterly and yearly projections and targets have been decided in advance. Top down cascading of goals have been the order of the day. Everyone has to merely follow their part of the goal, and rarely do those in the bottom few rungs know the big picture. The chain of command kept everything running seamlessly. The well-oiled machines of the corporate world ran beautifully sans ambiguity in the Industrial Era. Then came the Internet, the social web, and the digital revolution with its Cloud, IoT, 3D printing and robots. Borders and Kodaks vanished. AirBnB's and Ubers cropped up.

Suddenly, the time-tested business models floundered. S&P's report brought down the longevity of organizations from 75 to 15 years. Digital revolution brought with it a whole new set of paradigm shifts that the corporate world could not quite grasp. The new paradigms turned the age old business models upside down. Organizations that sensed the shift and could make the shift thrived. Some key factors that demarcated the progressive and successful organizations according to me...From Telling to Listening: The corporate world so far has thrived on telling its internal employees and its customers what to do, what to buy, and how to be. It has -- for the most part -- been a one-way monologue of laying down policies, stating rules, and selling the benefits of their myriad products and services. Then, the advent of the digital revolution turned everything on its head. Consumers became more powerful than the producers. Listening and sense-making became more important than telling. Social platforms democratized knowledge and organizations found it increasingly difficult to hide behind a facade of processes and policies. In an ever-changing and ambiguous environment, organizations that did not listen, missed the bus. They became completely irrelevant and failed to deliver what customers -- both outside and inside -- were clamoring for. They caved in and vanished. Organizations that listened reinvented themselves. And new entrepreneurial orgs appeared with an ability to tap into the unspoken, unimagined and unmet needs of the customers. They had listened! Deeply! A case in point is Uber which has not only disrupted the cab service industry but will also impact the automobile industry. Today, I see no reason to own a car with Uber at my veritable fingertips. From Profit to Prosperity: When we take stock of the last twenty years, we see amazing innovation and growth along side mayhem and destruction ranging from war to collapse of economies. We see the iconic rise of the likes of Malala Yousafzai with the rise of political demagogues. And we also see a collective rise of a different consciousness that wants larger social good. We see In this world of chaos, even as organizations struggle to make profit the traditional way, the call to move towards purpose and prosperity. Today's employees -- the millennials -- and customers are asking for more than profit. They are asking for purpose, for prosperity. I define prosperity as overall well-being -- of the self, of the organization, of the community, society and the planet. Driving top line and bottom line have brought us till here; but it is unlikely to get us much further. The need and cry for a more holistic and purpose-driven approach to how organizations operate is fast becoming a movement. From Market Share to Mind Share: As challenges become more and more complex, large scale and global in nature, collaboration will have to move from individuals to whole organizations. I am not talking about partner organizations working together, but generative organizations who share their learnings freely for other organizations to replicate and apply. The reason I say this is because, IMHO, profit will no longer be about market share. It will be about prosperity and mindshare, about enabling deep changes. Organizations today are on the cusp of change too... Just as we moved into the Industrial Era and a whole new breed of organizations and corporations were born, we are again at another cusp. The old world is dying and the new is waiting to be born. Organizations that can step into this new world authentically and fully will be the ones that will capture the mindshare of the human race, bring about deep and profound economic and social changes, and give birth to a completely new world order. It may not happen everywhere at the same time, but it is sure to happen. The world is ready for it. And this revolution will be more profound than the invention of the printing press or the electric bulb. It will change the nature and order of human relationships. Coming back to what I started the post with -- ambiguity and its relation to the shifts. If we agree that ambiguity is the order of the day, it becomes clear why we need to listen deeply to remain relevant, to let emergence happen, and move towards creating a better world. Ambiguity cannot be resolved through telling; it needs to be heard to be comprehended, for the hidden patterns to emerge, and for the unspoken to become felt needs. Ambiguity cannot be dealt with in parts. It has to be explored from divergent perspectives, through different lenses and heuristics, and felt in its entirety. Hence, a top down, hierarchical organization where information is filtered through the chain of command is especially ill-equipped to thrive in ambiguity. Only when the unspoken and tacit patters are seen, sense making happens, and emergence takes place. And emergence leads to those seemingly small but powerful innovations and practices that disrupt the established order of things. And I'm sure many more Ubers and Airbnb's are waiting round the corner, ready to erupt and disrupt.

Monday, August 8, 2016

Back after a long and deliberate break from blogging! Probably my longest thus far... Looking forward to writing and conversing with my community once again.

A couple of days back, I came across the article, The Scientific Reason Why Setting Goals can Backfire in Inc written by Rohini Venkatraman Replete with relevant data and insights, the article calls out the dangers of specific goals (SMART goals) which were and still are the darling of the corporate world, especially with the advent of MBO (Management by Objectives). Goals are cascaded down or rolled up, as the case may be. Individuals are measured against the goals achieved or not achieved (as per the manager/reviewer). The Bell Curve's existence depended on goals and still does. Organizations made and still make goal-based and goal-driven quarterly plans. This trend or practice is propelled by a strong desire to keep a control on the outcome, ensure stock prices rise, shareholders are happy, and predictability reigns. However, we also know that "predictable” jobs will be the first ones up for automation and robotization as Martin Ford mentions in his book, The Rise of the Robots.

This process of setting goals and going all out to achieve them work very well when a large part of the external ecosystem is predictable or changes at a pace that does not have an immediate and drastic impact on the work being done. Like it was for the past fifty years till the advent of the World Wide Web, ubiquitous connectivity, and SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud). And now we are entering the age of Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Chatbots. The coming of the digital world is changing organizations and the nature of our work at unprecedented speed. Predictability is giving way to ambiguity, uncertainty and volatility. In this context, trying to pre-define rigid goals can only lead to disaster and to being blindsided, as Rohini Venkatraman very aptly points out in the article.

Does that means we strike the death knell of Goals just as many organizations are doing or have done with the Bell Curve? IMHO, perhaps not! What we do need is to be aware of the dangers and the downside of rigid goals and creating a reward-structure based on stringent goal adherence. Authors of the Harvard Business School working paper, Goals Gone Wild, mentioned that the “systematic downside of goal setting has been disregarded for a long time”. This could perhaps be because setting goals and chasing them are easier than exploring and staying with ambiguity, learning on the go and remaining open to multiple and emergent realities. The challenge is exacerbated by the fact that most management schools excel at churning out command and control, bring predictability to the unknown, harness and leverage all resources kind of a mindset as opposed to exploration, staying curious, and collaborating to solve complex challenges. In a world of wicked problems, complexity and emergence, rigid goals do more harm than good. Without the leeway to browse and explore, under pressure to deliver impossible targets against a deadline, the best of leaders turn into efficiency-driven, blinkered project managers. And the outcome can often be missed opportunities, rising frustration, and even the downfall of the business should the trend continue long enough.

The question then is, what is the formula for success in a volatile and complex world? Is there a formula at all?

Let’s take a look at the Cynefin framework as a point of reference. In the Complex domain, it is evident that practices are emergent and ambiguity rules. Specific goals give way to an overarching outcome. The current world we operate in falls in the complex domain.

Against the backdrop of this shifting paradigms where the known is replaced increasingly by unknown unknowns (as seen in the Complex domain of the framework), goal setting can often be a futile exercise. Defining or envisioning one or more desired outcome, getting everyone involved, and enabling collaboration among groups of cognitively diverse and skilled individuals may be the route to get work done in this era. The critical question to ask then is, “If goal setting is not the way forward, what is”? I do not have the answer but I have attempted to provide some alternatives to goal setting in this post.

The nature of work and projects are changing. Work will increasingly get done by a set of dispersed and distributed individuals who are experts in their own space/field, and are cognitively diverse from each other. This set of individuals will likely come together within an organization to form a project team (much like a movie team comes together) and disperse once the work is done. They may also be individual freelancers coming together to complete a project bringing their expertise to the table. These individuals are not likely to be driven by rigid goals set by someone somewhere unknown to them. They will work in a collaborative manner very akin to a closed community to deliver a project outcome (in the manner of Wikipedia and Linux). As we move forward, projects and outcome desired will become increasingly more complex requiring cognitively and creatively diverse individuals to come together to deliver value. Goals will be set around the project rather than at an individual level. The success of the project will signify success for the team. An organization that fails to foster an environment where such communities can come together will very likely flounder. And those that enable such communities will innovate and thrive in the VUCA world.

I have highlighted some of the pitfalls of following rigid goals as I see it:

Can kill exploration -- Predefined goals often block the ability to see around it, especially in times of stress. Yet, it is during the most challenging times that we need to see beyond the obvious. Often, an overly narrow focus can be detrimental to innovation and can lead to missed opportunities. Most of the well-known innovations of our time came from tinkering around and perhaps failing at some seemingly important task (remember the Post-It Notes!). An over-emphasis on goals can also take the joy out of the process, the journey towards achieving the dream.

Can reduce collaboration –- When individuals are driven only by their own goals, a culture of competition sets in. Furthermore, when bell-curve like performance management systems rule, adhering to and meeting one’s goals become even more critical often to the detriment of the overall organizational culture. This leads to a very common syndrome seen in organizations where everyone has apparently done what they had set out to do, but the client is not happy or the project outcome is not what it should have been. The whole somehow becomes less than the sum of the parts.

Can reduce intrinsic motivation -- Goals, when rigidly defined, can reduce intrinsic motivation. The latter arises out of a combination of autonomy, mastery and purpose (as defined beautifully by Dan Pink). Stringent goals -- especially when set by someone else -- lead to reduction in inner motivation although external milestones may drive the person for sometime. But an over-fixation on goals can make people lose sight of their passion and purpose.

Goals definitely have their values. But in a complex and changing world, enjoying the process, developing skills like pattern sensing and a learner's approach is of greater value.

Monday, January 18, 2016

Rachel Happe begins her latest post, 10 Trends for the Future of Communities, with a comprehensive description of the various intersecting and intermingling streams and characteristics that inform communities, and I am quoting her below:

Communities sit at the intersection of a number of trends; social media, digital transformation, a generational shift to prioritize purposeful work, the future of work, change management, leadership and social learning.

The role of a Community Manager is becoming well-established with communities being perceived as platforms that have the potential to reduce the cost of communication, bridge organizational silos, facilitate cross-team conversations thus creating opportunities for innovation, knowledge transfer, expertise location, and more. However, despite of the various tangible and intangible benefits of communities, organizations are in reality discovering that establishing thriving communities and building a social business is challenging on various fronts, calling into question some of the very fundamental principles and frameworks on which organizations have been created. Here are some of the challenges:

1. Proliferating Platforms - Organizations, especially large, globally distributed organizations suffer from what I call the "unconscious silo syndrome". Most often, the inadvertent unawareness of what is happening in the rest of the organization give managers, decision-makers and other employees a feeling that "we are the new age torchbearers" and once it works in this team/project/business function, the initiative can be taken to the rest of the organization for an enterprise-wide implementation. Needless to say, it is human for all to want a bit of fame that comes with being the trendsetter and a possible organizational visionary. In reality, this leads to pockets of experimentation and duplication of effort without a holistic view of or alignment with the organizational strategy and business goals. The result is of course a less than desirable state of platform overdose, and an amplification of the offline silos onto a now online medium.

2. The "Bottom-Up" Approach- Many organizations tread on the conservative and cautious side and stay away from a big-bang launch for various reasons including skepticism at the leadership level, lack of skills in putting together a strategy for community building and management, fear of investing too much time and money without a clear idea of the intended results, and so on. The general approach usually adopted is to put in place a platform, do a bit of word-of-mouth marketing, and hope that people will start conversing and engaging on the platform. The initial few weeks, or even months, may see some traction, but it is usually scattered, disconnected and directionless. Very soon the enthusiasm of the initial few die down, the platform either becomes a ghost town or a land of thousand flowers and the expected outcome of communities and collaboration do not materialize. As Andrew McAfee, et al. highlight in their book Leading Digital...:

"...we saw no successful transformation happening bottom-up. Instead, executives in every Digital Master steered the transformation through strong top-down leadership: setting direction, building momentum, and ensuring that the company follows through."

3. Policy-Driven Paralysis- When a decision is made to embark on a community and collaboration journey on the duly selected enterprise collaboration platform, organizations become suddenly fearful of all the possibilities of information leakage, open expression of sentiments by irate employees, sharing of sensitive and politically incorrect information, and so on. The reaction is to begin by creating guidelines and policies trying to encapsulate and articulate everything that employees cannot and should not do on the platform. The result is anything but inspiring or conducive to open collaboration. It is akin to tying people up in chains and then expecting them to do a tango. IMHO, it is time to let go and show more trust in the very employees that the organization has selected through well-defined recruitment and interviewing processes.

4. Collaboration Conundrum- While we keep hearing the impending death knell of the bell curve, the truth is that a large percentage of organizations still abide by it for various reasons - lack of another system, familiarity syndrome, alignment of business and operational processes, management capability (or lack thereof in handling a new way of appraisal), HR and leadership lethargy, and more. The result is the creation of a tension between a competitive and a collaborative mindset. To be absolutely honest, it is very hard to be collaborative and share openly if an employee knows that s/he will be judged and measured against their peers when the appraisal time comes around. It is difficult for a manager to justify and facilitate open collaboration, and then do a rank and yank to fit a designated set of high-performers in the bell curve. And woe betide the manager who has too many high-performers and collaborators in his/her team. This false system of forced ranking eliminates collaboration, creates a sense of scarcity over abundance (be it for a specific rating or that prized project), and turns team members into opponents. Bye bye communities and collaboration!

5. Leadership Detachment - Many a times, something as critical as the building of a collaborative culture and thriving communities are left to the HR and L&D departments to drive. It is posited as "let's see if collaboration & social business works because everyone is talking about it". Senior leaders and C-suite members feel they are too time constrained to dabble in activities like communities when issues of graver import like shareholder profit, top line and bottom line figures, M&A's are awaiting their attention. However, the reality today is that without a connected, collaborative and resilient organization, all other strategy is likely to fail. Times of intense change and ambiguity as we are living in today demands collaboration and a strong leadership who will walk the talk.

6. Dearth of Digital Skills - It is not that people do not know how to tweet or post pictures on Facebook or create a Pinterest board. IMHO, digital skills go beyond the common activities that almost everyone with a smart phone can indulge in today. Digital skills are closely related to a digital mindset, which I define as "the ability to understand the power of technology to democratize, scale and speed up every form of
interaction and action." Very often, organizations -- this includes employees, leaders, managers, and everyone comprising the ecosystem -- lack this inherent capability of using technology to facilitate the building of PLNs (Personal Learning Networks) and communities. Digital skills include capabilities like working out loud, pattern sensing, sharing and connecting openly to develop a rich and diverse PLN, collaborating with a defined purpose, using technology with an awareness of its potential to promote self-driven learning, democratization of information, and so on. This mindset requires a degree of comfort with ambiguity, willingness to make mistakes, adopting a beginner's perspective, welcoming of diversity, and a willingness to learn from all possible sources.

Thursday, January 7, 2016

Designing courses is passé! In a world where the shelf-life
of knowledge and skills are rapidly shrinking, where best practices of yore
yield increasingly little or no return on investment, where exceptions are the
norm, and constant change and flux the new normal, designing set courses using
SME-defined content is like trying to build a dam to rein in the surging waves
of a tumultuous ocean. We have to think agile, instant, accessible, contextual,
micro-sized, real time… We need to uberize organizational learning.

“Uberization” has taken off as the new term that according to
me has come to stand for – disruption, innovation, lean operating model, harnessing
of the affordances of the sharing economy, and a hyper-connected world driven
by imagination and creativity where everything is a mobile-click away –
including learning. I agree that’s a string of nouns and adjectives and sounds
like I have thrown together a set of buzz words. But it’s not. If we do a bit
of Googling, we’ll see the term cropping up in every conceivable context with
posts talking about Let’s
Uberize the Entire Economy to The Uberization of Money.

I am taking uberization
more as a concept that encapsulates the characteristics listed above and, IMHO,
L&D has a lot to learn from this. The concept of uberization is shaped “by
combining smart-phone connectivity with voluminous real-time data on supply and
demand”. Let’s pause a bit and think what this would mean to the L&D world
in any organization. I’m not getting into the economics of how Uber operates;
however, it is worthwhile to remember in the L&D context that Uber owns no “assets”.
Agility and pull lie at the heart of uberization. Users – with a single tap on
the app – can get a ride. Uber taps into existing resources providing people –
both the suppliers and the buyers – with a platform to connect. The economy of “surge
pricing” defines the cost. Whether that is good or bad is beyond the purview of
this post. So, what do I mean when I talk about uberizing workplace learning?
And what role does L&D play in the process?

Before I delve into some of the characteristics of uberization
that we can extrapolate to workplace learning, here’s a few guidelines to keep
in mind wrt expectations from L&D. I increasingly see a trend where we’ll
have to:

Do more with less – less time, less resources,
less funding

Deliver customized, just-in-time, easily
accessible learning interventions and support on a continuous basis

Talk business outcomes and business performance,
not learning

Assess and prepare the organization for skills needed
in a VUCA world influenced by the forces of social, mobile, analytics, and
cloud

None of these will happen if we continue to sit in our
isolated ivory towers designing courses, managing training calendars and count
the number of days of training we have delivered to each employee. Business can
and will ask, “So what?” We have to get out there, get our hands dirty, talk to
business, read the company’s Annual Report, and figure out what is happening on
the business front. I wonder how many L&D folks go through Annual Reports
and Balance Sheets; however, this is where the crux of business can be
understood. And whatever impacts business should and must impact how we
function. Against this backdrop, technology is providing us with an opportunity
to re-imagine and redefine workplace learning and our role as business partners,
thought leaders, and change agents.

Here are a few things we can start doing immediately using
Uber as inspiration, if we are not on the path already.

Take a mobile-first
approach – Just as a ride is a tap away on the Uber mobile app, make
learning just as accessible and instant. Users are increasingly expecting all
interactions to happen via their mobile devices. Learning is no exception. Just
as the Uber app allows a user to track the route, a learning app should allow
the users/learners to see their learning roadmap personalized to their role and
growth path. L&D’s focus needs to shift from designing one-size fits all
courses to consulting with individual learners, their managers and HR, and
carving out learning roadmaps for them. By making what matters to employees available on mobile devices of their choice,
we can remove multiple barriers and enable them to pull what they need to
traverse their learning journey. We can take a leaf our of platforms like Udemy
or Coursera that offers a gamut of courses – all accessible via an app. Today’s
workers expect a similar integrated experience – the freedom to pick and choose
what they want to learn, where and when.

Build communities
– We are in the midst of the sharing
economy which is all about open data, user-generated content, crowd-sourcing,
shared value co-creation, collaboration, and more. It is no longer possible or
feasible – in the face of unforeseen change – for L&D to formally design
and develop all that will be needed to keep an organization at the cutting edge.
It’s time to acknowledge that the learners are active participants in the
system, and not just consumers of courses. L&D must move to becoming
facilitators and enablers in a sharing economy and provide the right technology,
tools and support necessary to allow users to collaboratively co-create value. This
will not only enable organizations to tap into the collective wisdom of the
crowd but will also move the organization towards becoming a truly learning
org. People are at the heart of a sharing economy, and people are at the heart
of a community. Organizations can no longer hope to thrive in a VUCA world without
enabling the coming together of their people. I have written extensively about
building communities in organizations in earlier posts here
and here
and here,
and will continue to explore this theme further this year. The more I reflect,
the more I strongly feel that the sustainability of an organization depends on
giving up control and letting the network
do the work. This fundamental principle lies at the heart of the success of
Uber as well. L&D and the organization’s role will be to provide a
highly-efficient sharing system and encourage participation. This calls for a
radically different kind of thinking where the managers, leaders, L&D and HR
– the gatekeepers of organizational resources including knowledge –
collectively move over to the role of facilitators who inspire and empower open
sharing, conversations, co-creation, and cooperation.

Curate from existing
sources – Tap into MOOCs, and other existing OERs. L&D needs to don the
curator’s hat – a critical 21st Century skill – that requires an
ability to seek, sense and share
(Harold
Jarche’s PKM model) relevant content for a defined target audience. Note
that content creation – so far the forte of most L&D folks – is not a part
of this. However, curation requires an even greater effort at creativity and an
ability to connect the dots, make sense of disparate information, and pull
these together to form a cohesive whole. It is not an easy skill to build and requires
constant honing, deep diving into the designated area of focus, talking to and following
experts in the field, using appropriate filtering mechanism to remove the chaff
from the wheat, and then presenting the curated content in a format that will
appeal to the end user. Moving from content creation to content curation
requires Uber-like thinking – create no asset, tap into networks, connect the
dots. I also liken it to developing a service-mindset over a product-mindset.

Build a culture of feedback
– Uber relies heavily on the ratings provided by users as well as the drivers. This
mutual rating system ensures that the standard is maintained more effectively
than any policing or management could do. L&D can definitely apply this to
how learners/employees rate their experiences of the learning, of the
engagement on the community, and encourage feedback. A culture of feedback
encourages transparency, highlights inefficiencies, and make improvements an
ongoing process. However, organizations with the help of L&D will have to
define what constitutes feedback as opposed to baseless criticism, rants, and
complaints. Genuine feedback comes with the intent to help improve, provide
insight, and either reaffirms a practice or encourages change. The overarching
intention is to make better. The
ability to give and receive feedback is another critical skill we need to
develop to thrive in a world in flux.

Make it an ongoing
effort – Uberization takes away the comfort of creating a one-time product
(a course), launching it, and moving on to repeat the process. Uberization
comes with a service-mindset. It is an ongoing effort that should eventually
become the new way of doing things. It requires a constant scanning of the
ecosystem – within as well as without, and gauging how external changes can impact
the organization ranging from the need to re-skill existing workforce to recruiting
scarce talent.

In summary, the world of L&D has dramatically changed. Just
as the rules of business and leadership have changed in the networked era, so
has the rules for how to enable employees to deliver with efficacy. The L&D
department can no longer sit in an isolated bubble designing courses for skills
that are fast becoming redundant. It is time to build an entirely new set of
skills in oneself as well as in the workforce.

Thursday, December 31, 2015

Sometimes it is the journey that teaches you a lot about your destination! ~ Drake

As the year draws to a close, I want to wish all my readers a joyful, learning filled, wondrous 2016! And I take this opportunity to express my heartfelt gratitude to all who kept inspiring me to write, who continued to support me, and kept me on my learning journey. The year's end always makes us reflective. In keeping with the mood of the day, I thought I would make a list of the posts that garnered the most views and comments and shares this year before moving on to write a new one. Maybe, I should keep the new one for the first day of the new year.

Even as I scrolled through my posts, I realized that somewhere along my blogging journey, I have shifted from a pure L&D focus to a more holistic organizational learning and social business focus. I am going to focus more on the latter in the coming year...I'm researching and reading up books, articles, and blogs related to social business, complexity science, systems thinking, disruptive technology and overall organizational development. I'll continue to use my blog as my platform for learning, sharing, reflecting, and ideating.

Here's the list of the top 10...I hope you will find it useful:

Integrating Social Learning in the Workplace - The post discusses some of the fundamental requirements--both culturally and strategically--that an organization must take into consideration when planning to integrate social learning in the workplace learning blend.

Social Learning Cannot be a Bolt-On Strategy - This post, a continuation of the earlier one, highlights some of the key strategic and leadership requirements necessary to make collaboration and sharing a success in an organization. Trust-based collaboration--in turn--leads to the building of an innovative and learning organization.

Working Out Loud 101: Some Thoughts - Dion Hinchcliffe, in his Today's Critical Digital Workforce Skills identifies Working Out Loud as one of the key skills. My post designed like an FAQ attempts to address some of the fundamental challenges people face when asked to begin practicing working out loud to share and collaborate.

7 Strategies to Facilitate Working Out Loud - I firmly believe that working out loud will increasingly become a valued skill that will enable teams to stay connected and work together effectively despite the barriers of location and time zones. It will help a distributed workforce and a geographically dispersed organization to bridge silos and tap into the tacit knowledge of a cognitively and culturally diverse workforce leading to a more innovative and resilient organization. This post outlines some of the key strategies that can enable the culture of working out loud in an organization.

Workplace Learning in a World Beyond Automation - This post was written in response to an HBR article called Beyond Automation (a must read) that describes the advent of automation through the ages, and talks about the rise of smart machines. My post is an attempt to extend this thinking into the workplace and the impact it is likely to have on the nature of work, learning and human relationships as we move towards 2020. Will the world be radically different from the one we inhabit today? Will robots be our colleagues? How will this impact workplace learning, HR policies, and the nature of the organization?

Social Technology, Community Management, and Organizational Development - Written in response to a diagram that Dion Hinchcliffe (yes, he's my online guru for all things social business) had created to show how Technology and Business are Co-evolving into the Future Organization, I have highlighted the role of technology in building communities in organizations. I've gone on to discuss how communities will change the nature of organizations and organizational learning. This is an area I intend to further deep-dive into, explore and write about in 2016. I believe that communities are cornerstones of social businesses and that will be my key area of focus in the coming year.

"Digital Mindset": What is it All About? - This post explores what it means to have a digital mindset going beyond mere digital and tech savvy to emphasize characteristics like agility, openness, trust, respect for diversity and comfort with ambiguity and uncertainty. This is one of my personal favorites and again an area I will delve into more often in 2016.

Becoming a Social Business: Beyond Culture Change - While the corporate world is abuzz with "social learning," "social business" and all things "social", I have tried to reflect upon and unravel some of the common terms and phrases typically associated with organizations that impact our discourse on social. The very words we use could be influencing and propagating certain deeply-rooted organizational practices that may prove counter-productive to the building of a culture conducive to facilitating a social business.

Demystifying Working Out Loud - I often have people asking me about the practices involved in working out loud and what do they imply. This post is a short attempt to highlight what it is and also what working out loud is not.

L&D's Role in a Purpose-Driven Workplace - I do believe that organizations will no longer be able to attract or retain valuable and talented employees by just focusing on shareholders' value increase. They will have to articulate a purpose and the intention of a greater social good to thrive in today's evolving and complex economy. The current and coming generation are likely to enter the workplace with a different set of values that will call for a different approach, and possibly a redefinition of what an organization implies.

I hope you enjoy reading the posts. I'd love to dialogue with you and hear different perspectives.

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

A paradigm shift occurs when
prevailing mental model has so many egregious anomalies that it “breaks” and a
new mental model of the world is perceived to be a better explanation of how
the world works. ~Steve Denning

Our words define our worldview.
We use the vocabulary available to us to describe and analyze our experiences
and perceptions. The founder of the idea
that language and worldview are inextricable is William von Humboldt, the
Prussian philologist. The German word Weltanschauung—used
to represent the mode of apprehending reality of a community—was first used by
Kant and later popularized by Hegel. Weltanschauung represents the collective consciousness
of a community of a certain experience.

In this context, I had a bit
of an epiphany. Over the past few years, the need to become a social business and
to promote enterprise-wide collaboration have taken hold in many organizations.
The usual approach is to launch an enterprise collaboration platform (technology
first being easy to do) and hope that people will engage and contribute with a
bit of cajoling and coercing. But a majority of these endeavors fail leading to
skepticism and finger pointing. The usual culprits are the hapless organizational culture closely followed by
hierarchy and leadership lethargy. We have become accustomed to blaming the
culture of an organization for the failure of any initiative, and more so when
the change calls for redefining and re-imagining how people work and interact. Before
I proceed further, let me clarify that these culprits are not blameless. A fair
number of mistakes can be attributed to them. I only want to say these do not invoke
the complete picture. We have to dive deeper to understand why organizations
across the world – from the Americas to Asia – are apparently making the same
mistakes.

We have to take a step back
and examine the metaphors and the discourse that organizations abide by and are
described by. The crux of the problem lies in our inability to see how the
culture of organizations stem from and is shaped by the very discourse of
management that we have collectively subscribed to ever since the Industrial Revolution
and the manufacturing era. No matter how hard we try to change the culture –
and I do believe that leaders and managers are trying – the discourse we use
lets us down. The words become reality.
Currently, our management discourse is permeated by the language of two metaphors
– the military and the manufacturing. The business model and
operating principles in today’s organizations hinge on “making” profit through
the deft use of limited resources in an organized manner. The military metaphor
dominates the world of business – right from “staff”, “line”, “chain of command”,
to “war for talent”, “competitive strategy”, and “line of fire”. The assumption is that doing business
is akin to waging war and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Organizations thus
begin to behave with an almost “military” mindset – valuing planning over innovation,
dwelling on constraints over opportunities, giving in to enforcing over
enabling, compliance over collaboration…

Underlying this military and
manufacturing discourse is an insidious and difficult to pin down aspect – the scarcity mindset – be it of money,
skills, information, time, talent, and so on. A world defined by scarcity is driven
by the ethos of competition, hoarding, survival of the fittest, suspicion,
exclusion, elimination of the other, and
fear. These concepts are fundamentally opposed to the principle and values that
support cooperation and collaboration – the pillars of social business and
authentic communities. As long as our organizations are operating under the
principle of scarcity, we will continue to struggle to get people engaged and
motivated enough to collaborate. The words we use not only reflect but also reinforce
and reproduce the reality. The words become
reality.

Now, let’s look at the words
that come to mind when we thing “community” which has its root in the Latin
word “communitas” meaning things held in common. Community elicits
in my mind words like commune, abundance, love, wholeness, trust, belonging,
authenticity, creation, safety, inclusion… and other similar words. As anyone
who has ever been or aspires to be a community manager, we know that these are
the emotions that we have to inspire in our users for them to become engaged
and collaborative community members. However, the discourse that defines
community within organizations get subsumed under the larger discourse of the
organization itself which, as I have already mentioned, is defined by scarcity
and competition. When the two discourses clash, the larger one signifying the
organization as a whole inevitably wins. The
words become reality.

Let me make a disclaimer. This
clash is not the fault of managers or leaders taking the organization forward –
in most cases, it is done in good faith. Controls are put in place to prevent
information from going to competitors; non-compliance is punished; transparency
is censored to prevent general dissent. And we simplistically club all of these
under the umbrella of an amorphous and ambiguous culture and dismiss it by saying that “the culture of the
organization is not conducive to collaboration”. We have to identify the words
that run counter to authenticity, trust and transparency and replace them with
a different set of words when speaking about organizations. Words carry their
own denotation and connotation and define our consciousness. It might seem like
a trivial matter, but it truly has deep implications for the kind of transformation
organizations need to go through in order to become authentic communities.

The discourse of communities
doesn’t and cannot hinge on and around scarcity. We need to redefine and
reimagine the very description of an organization itself. What if we were to
define an organization like a community: “Self-organized network of people with
common agenda, cause, or interest, who collaborate by sharing ideas, information,
and other resources...” (Wikipedia). We have to shift from the old ways of
working that was driven by extrinsic motivation – bonus, salary hike, promotion,
and other tangible rewards to one that is driven from the heart, that engages
people intrinsically by giving them the autonomy, providing the purpose and
creating a sense a belonging. Jeremy Scrivens writes in his post, The
Future of Work is Social Business at Scale, “…authenticity is not only the foundation of collaboration and
innovation, it is the very experience of being well - being who you really are
- Being! not just doing.”

Tangible rewards are limited,
and hence automatically lead to competition and fight for survival. In contrast,
intrinsic motivation, authenticity, trust, and kindness stem from a deeper
source of abundance. Organizations need to shift their paradigms and transform
at a far deeper level than we are currently addressing. To see real impact, and deep and lasting transformation, we have to
attack the root, and reimagine the organizational metaphor.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

I
had the good fortune to meet Jay in 2011 when he, along with Clark Quinn came
down for EDGEx – The Disruptive Education conference. That was the first time I
met him face to face, and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Apart from the
fact that I was totally in awe and had to muster the courage to go and speak
with him, I think I was expecting a serious individual, the distinguished author of many books who had coined the term “e-learning” and led the thinking in the field of learning.
An iconic figure in my mind… The individual I encountered was full of zest and
spirit, fun-loving with a quirky sense of humor, and a warm, affectionate
heart. I was bowled over. I think I behaved a bit like a star -truck teenager
but that is understandable when you meet Jay Cross in person for the first time.

My introduction
to Jay had been through his book Informal
Learning. Needless to say, it had become my bible to understand
what social learning is and could be in the context of workplace learning. In
those days, I was just a rookie instructional designer trying to write
storyboards and grasp the basics of e-learning. I stumbled upon his book and
him (virtually) on Twitter. I still remember the excitement I felt when I read Informal
Learning and subsequently Working Smarter. Jay infused a new way of looking at
how learning happens. For a learning-hungry person like me, it was like manna
from heaven. I understood the concept of workscapes for the first time:

There
were so many Aha! moments as I journeyed through Jay’s books and thoughts. They
are too innumerable to list down. I consider myself absolutely privileged to
have been included as a part of the advisory board for his latest book – Real Learning!
I don’t know what value I added, but I know I got a tremendous amount just by
going through the draft of the book, interacting with Jay and other thought
leaders in the group. I keep learning from him!

Jay’s
excitement and enthusiasm was infectious. He had an almost indefatigable zest
for learning, for enjoying life, and a childlike curiosity for exploring. As little as a fortnight ago,
he was contemplating different platforms for hosting the Real Learning
community. He never stopped thinking of new ways of looking at things, of
learning and helping others learn better. We will go on learning from him and
reaping the benefits of all that he has left us with – a veritable legacy in
how we approach informal and self-directed learning!

Thursday, November 5, 2015

“…changes in mindset
are more important than changes in hardware or software.”

~Steve Denning

What is
common across the learning modes and methods mentioned?

Social
learning via an enterprise collaboration platform

Mobile
enabled learning accessible anytime, anywhere, on any device of the user’s
choice

MOOCs
which straddle the line between social learning and e-learning with learner
communities

While an
organization can facilitate these, the onus lies with the users/learners. These
are essentially “pull” and collaborative learning modes and cannot be imposed. These
forms often intersect with one another, and are used in various combinations
depending on the organization’s need, users’ comfort and the capabilities
required to design the ecosystem. Having said that, a major percentage of
organizations today are striving to put in place one or more of the above-mentioned
modes and tools of learning. This is leading to a shift in the role of the
L&D department – from managers and disseminators of formally designed programs to facilitators and enablers of collaboration and communities. I have
written about the new skills that L&D and HR needs to make this transition
in my posts here
and here.
In this post, I am going to explore six key requirements necessary from an
organizational and leadership standpoints to make collaborative and emergent learning
work. But first,

What is emergent learning?

Emergent Learning is a condition and
an outcome of organizational culture, strategy and purpose.

It arises out of a combination of networked
leadership, HR and L&D efforts, and meaningful work. It leverages the powers
of networks and social platforms, and the affordances of mobile and cloud to
build an interconnected and continuously learning organization. When fully
realized and supported, emergent learning provides autonomy, mastery and
purpose to learners and agility, adaptability and resilience to organizations. It
empowers learners to build their personal learning networks (PLN) and personal
knowledge management (PKM) by leveraging technology to connect a distributed
and diverse workforce. Emergent learning by definition takes place in the
workflow; it is always contextual, collaborative, and beyond the norms of
formal learning. Emergent learning cuts across formal organizational structures
and siloes and brings out the inherent tacit knowledge and ongoing collective experience
building a shared journey for all concerned. In this context, it is important
to remember that technology is an enabler, an amplifier and connector. It is
there solely to serve the purpose of the users, to empower them to explore and
engage.

Thus,

Emergent learning
= Nurturing Evolving Human Potential by giving individuals the power to learn
the way they want to.

When any
organization or institution shifts from a hierarchical, top-down mode to a
horizontal, peer- and user-driven one – be it in management or learning – culture
plays a huge role in the success or otherwise of the endeavor. “The DNA of
“peer trust” is built on opposite characteristics – micro, bottom-up, decentralized,
flowing and personal” (The
Changing Rules of Trust in the Digital Age). This is perhaps the biggest mind
shift that organizations have to make in the digital era and to facilitate an environment
of continuous learning. While the pace of change and the need for constant
re-skilling has adeptly shifted the onus of learning away from institutions to
individuals, this comes with a new set of responsibility and change in mindset.
IMHO, these are the six key changes organizations need to make to enable emergent
learning.

Shift from networks to communities. The affordances of ubiquitous connectivity,
pervasive mobility and cloud, and the prevalence of social media ensure that
organizations today are connected. However, facilitating networks is not enough
albeit it’s the necessary precursor to building communities. As Henry Mintzberg
points out in the HBR article, We Need
Both Networks and Communities. “At the organizational level, … effective
companies function as communities of human beings, not collections of human
resources.” The article resonates with my belief that organizations today must
foster trust-based peer communities to encourage collaboration and cooperation.
It is in communities that knowledge is exchanged and challenges solved.

Give up hierarchical, command and
control mindset. While
we are wont to blame the management models of the Industrial Era and their
continuing prevalence today for the lack of trust and transparency we see in
many/most organizations, we have to understand that this model served its
purpose when scalable efficiency and productivity were the desired outcome. Today
in the face of rapid change and technological evolution, this same model is
failing us; it’s becoming a roadblock to seamless collaboration and flow of information.
Managers schooled in the hierarchical system find it difficult to give up
control. Even the physical design of organizations (although many are changing)
with its corner offices, and other visible symbols of hierarchy reinforce the
order. It’s not enough to espouse a belief in an open culture; it requires redefining
the way leadership functions and their external manifestations.

Make employee engagement an outcome,
not the goal. IMHO, it’s
an organization fallacy to make employee engagement the goal. Employee engagement
is not a set of isolated and random activities. It is an outcome of a number of
collective activities, organization culture and overall employee experience. These
experiences begin even before an employee joins an organization and continues till
the time they leave, and even thereafter in the firm of alumni communities. Every
step of an employee’s journey wrt the organization from the interview process
to project allocation to interactions with management and peers adds up to
define the culture which in turn drives employee engagement or lack thereof. Emergent
learning is a key outcome of employee engagement. Engaged employees feel valued
and respected; this leads them to collaborate and cooperate in the interest of
the organization as well as their own development. Disengaged employees neither
learn nor share.

Make the purpose bigger than shareholder
value creation. In
the new world, shareholders’ value will continue to exist but not as a primary
driver for organizations that seek to attract, retain and build a community of
talented individuals or make an impact on the world. An authentic and purpose-driven
organization that is seen to give back to society is more likely to attract and
retain employees. Purpose and shared value creation are strong drivers of
learning inspiring people to share and collaborate towards the achievement of a
bigger vision.

Stop viewing individuals as
replaceable resources. Even today, well into the second decade of the knowledge era and the
creative economy, organizations still treat individuals as resources. While no
one would clear an interview if they said, “I am just like everyone else, and
have no unique qualities,” it is precisely what organizations strive to do once
you are in.Kill the uniqueness and
make one fit a mold. And then perversely complain that people are not creative,
innovative, or using their brains. Basically, it’s a dichotomy! What organizations
need and want are being fundamentally curbed by their very systems and
processes created to uphold uniformity, predictability, and homogeneity. The leaders
and managers are as much a victim of the system as the employees. The systems
and processes established 200 years ago were created to augment human brawn
with machines. They are ill-equipped to support a world that revolves around
the uniqueness of the human brain. It calls for transformational leadership and
cultural mind-shift. Individuals treated like replaceable cogs will behave like
cogs; not self-driven learners.

Celebrate diversity in all aspects –
cognitive and otherwise. Learningand insight take
place when diverse thoughts and ideas collide. “I have never in my life learned
anything from any man who agreed with me,” Dudley Malone had famously said. And
it is partially at least true. Diversity and inclusion cannot only be a part of
HR policy anymore; it is necessary for the very survival of organizations as we
enter the VUCA world. Emergent learning cannot happen unless diverse ideas and
experiences find a place to converge and come together. Hence, the communities
that organizations facilitate – online or offline -- should consciously enable
the coming together of diverse individuals.

All of these
feel like massive changes and they are. I’ll go a step further and say that collectively
put together, these moves lead to transformation. Change is primarily tactical,
process-driven with a known outcome that one drives toward. Transformation is revolutionary!
It takes us from the known to the unknown in the nature of an explorer embarking
on a journey of discovery in a bid to find a new world. Here’s a telling
excerpt from an HBR article that I’ll end with:

“Change
management” means implementing finite initiatives, which may or may not cut
across the organization. The focus is on executing a well-defined shift in the
way things work.

…

Transformation
is another animal altogether. Unlike change management, it doesn’t focus on a
few discrete, well-defined shifts, but rather on a portfolio of initiatives,
which are interdependent or intersecting. More importantly, the overall goal of
transformation is not just to execute a defined change — but to reinvent the
organization and discover a new or revised business model based on a vision for
the future. It’s much more unpredictable, iterative, and experimental. It
entails much higher risk. And even if successful change management leads to the
execution of certain initiatives within the transformation portfolio, the
overall transformation could still fail.” We
Still Don’t Know the Different between Change and Transformation

Monday, November 2, 2015

This weekend—31st Oct
and 1st November -- was spent at the #BNLF conference held at The
Lalit, Mumbai. Intrigued by the name and impressed
by the lineup of speakers consisting of people like Purba Ray of the A-Musing fame (I have always been
intrigued by that hyphen), Arnab Ray, the author of May I
Hebb Your Attention Pliss, better known as the @greatbong, Anshul Tiwari, Founder and
Editor-in-Chief of Youth ki Awaaz, Christoph
Trappe, the writer of The Authentic Storytelling Project blog, Jeff Bullas whose blog I have been
following from years, Preeti Shenoy and none other than Bruce Dickinson of Iron
Maiden – decided how I would spend my weekend. This post is a summary of my
impression of Day 1.

This was my first BNLF, and I
wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the blogging fraternity. I had somehow assumed
that a hundred odd people would turn up and most would be fans of writers like
Arnab Ray and Purba Ray… . I turned up at The Lalit well-ahead of time as I’m
wont to do, and was ready to meander in the lobby when I encountered at least 300+
people generally hanging around – some in clusters, some alone and some
evidently #BNLF organizers wearing the hashtag T-shirt. Hmm! Not quite what I
had envisaged for sure. Within a span of 15~20 mins, the 300 swelled to 500+
with more coming. And registration was yet to start. I learned that this amorphous
bunch of people consisted of #BNLF regulars as well as the uninitiated like me.
“Welcome to the tribe,” someone said. “Are you’ll all bloggers,” I asked? “Yes,
of course,” was the somewhat astonished response. That shut me up for sure!

Purba Ray on Stage

There were bloggers from all over
India—from Delhi, Chandigarh, Pune, Kolkata, Banglaore… There were bloggers writing
on every kind of topic imaginable—from gardening to lifestyle, urban yoga to
urban homes, from quilling to political spoofs – if you can think of a topic,
there was probably a blogger there writing on it. There were bloggers ranging
from 21 year olds to folks in their 50’s. I couldn’t have been more mistaken in
my assumptions. And everyone had come to learn, to improve their blogging
skills, to pick-up techniques and methodologies to take their blogging to the
next level. I was impressed and a little bit awed.

Being used to conferences like
#SHRM, #HRTech, and other corporate affairs, I was in for another dose of shock
when we entered the main venue post registration. It looked nothing like a
conference room. It resembled a rock-show arena with a brightly lit,
kaleidoscopic stage, laser lights doing their thing and various musical
instruments (I don’t know all the names so won’t get into the details) casually
strewn about. The long hall held rows and rows and rows of white chairs – at least
a 1000 it seemed -- and looked somewhat surreal to me. I quickly grabbed one in
the first row and settled down. The day began with rock music—yes! no corporate
affair this one! 700+ people were on their feet rocking and swaying and clapping
to “We don’t need no Education” and other favorites. What a start!

The day maintained the momentum
and the speakers didn’t let us down either. Each had their unique story and
perspectives to share. I’ve made a holistic list of my key takeaways from the
day that I felt would be worth sharing for other bloggers like me.

Bring Constancy
and Commitment: This theme cropped up in everyone’s talk and the
masterclasses that followed on Sunday. More about these in my next post.
Without exception everyone spoke about being committed and regular with one’s
blogging schedule, to post on a specific day of the week, and even at a
specific time. The trick is to have a set of posts ready and scheduled to publish.
This not only helps loyal readers keep track of your writing but also helps in
search engine rankings. While I theoretically knew all this, I had not gotten
around to being this disciplined. Coming from some of the most respected
bloggers and writers, it was a hard-hitting message for me.

Keep it
Conversational: Apparently, while we all like to sound erudite and believe
that obfuscating points make them more interesting, it is not true. I pondered
a while and realized that the blogs I like in my domain are all written in the
simplest language without any loss of depth or impact. The first example that
came to my mind was @AbhijitBhaduri ‘s blog! So, keeping it simple, using short
words, and writing as if we were explaining a concept to a friend is a good
approach to follow.

Make it
Authentic: In their various ways, each of the speakers emphasized this with
Christoph Trappe making it the core
of his piece. Of course to be authentic, it is essential to feel deeply and
passionately about our domain of blogging. It is impossible to be authentic
without being passionate. It also implies being vulnerable and open,
considering readers as friends. A stilted and fake voice will neither get us
loyal readers nor make us feel satisfied with our writing.

Re-purpose
Content: I often forget that I can use my blog post to create a SlideShare
presentation, craft unique tweets or use the images for Pinterest boards.
Re-purposing content across different social media channels in different forms not
only ensures a wider and more constant reach but also addresses varied audience
preferences and needs.

Keep an
Eye on the Headline: According to research, listicles are a great way to
get attention for primarily three reasons -- 1) provide a container around
content pieces; 2) make it easy for the readers to keep track, and go back and
forth; and 3) make it easy to recall. While definitely not all my posts can
have a title beginning “7 ways to…” and “9 things to keep in mind…”, it is an
advice worth remembering. Headlines are very critical, especially in this era
of content abundance and attention deficit. Headlines should clearly tell
readers what they can expect from the post.

Remember
the 60-30-10 Rule: This specifically struck a chord with me. Christoph
Trappe mentioned that successful blogging is defined by this rule of time and
effort breakup – where 60% is devoted to creating authentic and original content;
30% should be given to listening and conversation because blogging is not a
siloed activity; and 10% effort can be spent on sharing and linking on
different social platforms. This is a good rule of thumb I intend to practice
more consciously.

Don’t be Over-Dependent
on Social Media: Jeff Bullas emphasized the importance of focusing on
search and doing keyword research for those serious about growing their
readership. Good content is of course a must and a given. According to him, the
power of headlines, images and email lists should not be ignored. I’m going to
explore these one at a time and test for impact.

All in all, Day 1 gave me plenty
of food for thought and action. I know consistency is going to be my key issue,
with procrastination my Achilles’ heel. Look out for posts on the Day 2 Workshops and other unique moments.